Advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi has put down in black and white what plenty of women around here have been thinking for ages: we want technology but we don't want it coloured pink or encrusted with fake gemstones.

Several weeks ago, security researcher Lawrence Baldwin dispatched an urgent email to abuse handlers at OptimumOnline, the broadband provider owned by Cablevision, warning that one of its customers stood to lose more than $60,000 to cyber crooks.

Tor advertises itself as a means for people and groups to improve their privacy. And when used properly, the distributed, anonymous network does just that. But a Swedish security consultant has used the very same system to gain access to login credentials for a thousand or so individual email addresses, including those of at least 100 accounts belonging to foreign embassies.

A police officer involved in the search for adventurer Steve Fossett - who went missing last Monday after taking off from hotelier Barron Hilton's Flying M Ranch, roughly 70 miles southeast of Reno, Nevada - has admitted he "may never be found", the BBC reports.

You know how you can volunteer to be a TV ratings guinea pig? And then they - Nielsen or whoever - attach kit to your telly so that they can tell everything you and all your thousands of fellow guineapigs watch, and so the ratings get compiled.

Intel has begun the process of ridding itself of an entire generation of 65nm Core processors, to pave the way for 45nm 'Penryn' Core 2 chips, due to begin appear in November. Marked for termination: all the Core Solo and Core Duo CPUs.

Intel will take no further orders for the four-core Core 2 Extreme QX6700 processor on 4 January 2008, the company has told its customers. And they'll have to get orders in before 2 November 2007, if they want the right to cancel at a later date.

The organisation behind the .eu domain has suspended 10,000 domain names registered by a Chinese woman whom it accuses of being a cybersquatter. The woman, in retaliation, has filed a lawsuit in Belgium.

Updated
Lord Justice Sedley's proposal to put everyone in the UK on a DNA database would be dependent on a British man's case against the UK at the European Court of Human Rights, according to a privacy law expert.

Is Sony's new portable music playar an attempt to cash in on the Rugby World Cup? With its ovoid shape, the Rolly certainly has a football feel, but instead of air, this ball packs in an MP3 player, funky coloured lights and a pair of loudspeakers. And it moves.

After weathering the dust storms of the past two months, the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have had their solar panels swept free off dust by kinder, gentler winds. With full power restored, the two explorers are now ready to renew their slow crawl over the surface of the red planet.

NSFW
Our female readers looking for an earth-moving experience are directed forthwith not to the San Andreas fault, but rather to the profoundly silly My Little Secret Talking Head mp3 vibrator - a "breakthrough in adult toys" that allows you to "download and listen to erotic audio fantasies or record your own for the ultimate in personalized pleasure".

Quocirca's changing channels
The IT industry is in danger of becoming an unnecessary apologist for environmental woes caused by the equipment it sells. While there is certainly room for improvement in the way IT procurement and infrastructure is managed, this must not be overshadowed by the more positive aspects that good use of IT can make to the overall greening of businesses. However, manufacturers and resellers of IT products and services need to get better at putting this message across.

The wraps come off Palm's latest Euro-centric smartphone on Wednesday, and while speculation has centred on the notion the device might be the company's upcoming Centro product, Palm has claimed it isn't.

The Great White Hope of the music business - and many network operators - has arrived in the UK. The music business hopes it will persuade people to start paying for licensed digital music, while operators hope it will persuade people to start using their expensively built, but under-utilised 3G networks.

Review
The whole point of wireless is the freedom to connect to something from anywhere within an area rather than from a single, specific place. Icron's WiRanger wireless USB hub system stumbles at the first hurdle. Yes, its two units - the hub and the box that connects to your computer - link wirelessly, but both need mains-power feeds. Good for desktops, then, but not for a laptop-friendly experience.

The obsessive secrecy provided by the Patriot Act for certain domestic surveillance activities suffered a severe blow yesterday, as a federal judge struck down provisions of the Act that provided for expansive and secretive use of so-called "National Security Letters" (NSL) to obtain phone and email records.

Europe, send your unwanted mobile phone to... Wales. Well, from November, anyway. In that month, the continent's largest cellphone recycling plant will open its doors for business by logistics specialist Excel.

A team from Nottingham University's archaeology department believes it has rediscovered the remains of an intact Viking boat under a Merseyside pub - originally unearthed in the 1930s by builders excavating the boozer's basement, but quickly reburied because they feared "an archaeological dig would disrupt their work".

New images from the Japanese infrared space telescope AKARI have revealed giant star-forming regions on the edge of the spiral galaxy M101. The findings suggest M101 is something of a special case, since star formation more usually happens in the denser central part of spiral galaxies.

UMPC maker OQO will next week launch an updated version of its Model 2 handheld in Europe, upping the Windows Vista device's processor and storage specs, and - if OQO does what it's just done in the US - a reduced price.

A year ago, hardly a week went by without news of a major municipal wireless project in the US, supporting free or subsidized access and a host of shiny business models. Now hardly a week goes by without news of the death of one of these plans.

Reg Technology Panel
Over the past two or three years, zanily named social networking tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr and Twitter seem to have come from nowhere to wheedle their way into just about every aspect of online life, both in business and pleasure. Such facilities share a handful of simple, but powerful core features: each will enable information sharing of some form, will have some kind of community orientation and will be constructed in a way that several of the blighters can be merged (or should I say, “mashed up”) into clever, multifaceted concoctions of collaborative capability.

Middle England is none too pleased with a Home Office campaign aimed at "reminding 'holiday virgins' to apply for their passports in good time to avoid missing out on the fun of a first parent-free holiday".

Apple's new iPod Classic and iPod Nano will require new accessories if you plan to display the videos the players contain on your TV, it has been alleged. Apple has apparently blocked TV output from these new players when they're connected to old docks.

Unnamed Pentagon figures continue to get big ink for their thesis that Chinese military cyber assault is a threat of trouser-moistening magnitude. Last week's media bandwagon, initiated after Financial Times hacks in Washington obligingly got things rolling, is now thundering along unstoppably as foaming tech-dunce scribes pile aboard.

Orange UK has shown off the pink LG Shine phone it plans to offer to UK consumers in the run up to Christmas - along with a rose-tinted Samsung F210, and salmon-hued W580i and W200i from Sony Ericsson.

Broadcom, manufacturer of set-top box chip sets and Qualcomm annoyer, has added Bluetooth to its set-top box reference platform; which should see the death of the infrared remote control within a couple of years.

The rumors about VMware putting ESX Server on dietary supplements have been confirmed. The virtualization darling today revealed ESX Server 3i - a super-thin hypervisor that will be built into the memory of servers from companies such as Dell, HP and IBM.

Our analysis of the prospects and possibilities for the new iPod Touch got readers very excited. Not a single reader used the words "locked-down, overpriced PDA", which would have been a natural retort. But not one person could get excited about YouTube, either.